Niamh Shackleton
A man has revealed how he beat the 1 in 300 million odds of winning the lottery not just once, but a whopping 14 times.
While most of us who dabble in a bit of lottery-playing every now and again jot down a random series of numbers, cross our fingers and toes and hope for the best, Stefan Mandel had a completely different approach.
The Romanian-Australian mathematician didn't leave whether he was in with a chance of winning up to luck like the rest of us. Oh no, he sat down and decided to work out the best combination of numbers to put down to increase his chances of winning the jackpot.
Mandel enlisted the help of a group of investors and a syndicate called the International Lotto Fund (ILF) and they went on to target lotteries in the US, Romania and Australia.
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And how they won? Well, that's all down to what Handel says is 'simple math'.
The money-making method went on to earn Mandel a staggering $27 million jackpot prize, alongside a still cushty $900,000 in additional prizes for tickets that placed second, third, fourth and so on back in 1992.
While Mandel's schemes weren't technically illegal - they definitely rose a whole load of suspicions with authorities as various international agencies, including the CIA and the FBI, investigated him and the ILF for wrongdoing.
However, both Mandel and the ILF were ultimately cleared.
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Mandel entered a lengthy years-long legal battle and while he was acquitted for all the crimes he was accused of - the whole ordeal caused him a bunch of financial trouble.
The big-hitter would later declare bankruptcy in 1995 just three years after his mammoth win, and went on to spend the next decade running various investment schemes.
His number-picking algorithm he called 'combinatorial condensation' - which rested on the price of buying enough lottery tickets to play every possible combination being less than the jackpot prize - led the US to establish laws to ban it altogether.
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The lottery rules were changed to ban punters from bulk-buying tickets as well as the use of computer-generated tickets to ensure no one else could replicate Mandel's methods.
Nowadays, the lottery legend spends his golden years in a beach on a remote tropical island called Vanuatu off the coast of Australia, after having declared himself 'retired from the lottery' altogether.
"I’m a man who takes risks, but in a calculated way," Mandel told Romanian newspaper Bursa back in 2012.
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"Trimming my beard is a lottery: There is always the possibility that I’ll cut myself, get an infection in my blood and die — but I do it anyway. The chances are in my favor."